TRANSPORTATION, TREASURY, HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT, THE JUDICIARY, THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA AND INDEPENDENT AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2007 -- (House of Representatives - June 14, 2006)
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Mrs. NORTHUP. Mr. Chairman, I speak against this amendment. You know, I think all of us want the same thing. We want to make sure that affordable housing is available to as many American families as possible.
In 1999 we changed the rules, and we made every community live by a certain number of units, not how far they could stretch those dollars. And our costs exploded. In fact, in the HUD budget the section 8 voucher program went from 33 percent of the HUD budget to over 50 percent of the HUD budget.
Now, if you believe that the Federal Government has unlimited dollars, that wouldn't worry you. But if you believe that we live in a time where we have to measure every dollar and spend it carefully, you begin to ask what we could do better. Let me reiterate. It went from 33 percent of the HUD budget to 51 percent, but it didn't include one additional voucher. Not one additional American family was able to have a voucher based on those increases in costs. And let me say that the dollars were significant, too. We increased the dollars by over 50 percent in the section 8 program, and still not one additional American family was able to be served by a section 8 voucher. The changes that we are making today are going to allow every community to take the dollars that they have and to use them more effectively and more efficiently so that we can begin to use the section 8 which are already an enormous part of our budget to serve more American families in the future. The idea is to help Americans get into the units that their family wants to get into, maybe near where they work, maybe near where their family is that can help them watch their children, maybe into a private housing unit where the budget just makes up the difference in the voucher, so that they can live where they want and become independent American families based on the section 8, and not just the 9,000 families that we have in Louisville, Kentucky today but hopefully many more in the future due to these reforms.
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